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Wednesday, December 21, 2016

You don’t hear a lot about guinea
pigs these days.In the pantheon of
house pets, they just don’t rank all that high, which is kind of a shame,
because I think they’re pretty nifty.They’re easy to take care of, they’re cute as buttons, and they’re fairly
even-tempered.My family had one back
when I was young.Her name was Petunia
(get it?), and I used to push her around on my cheap, plastic skateboard (back
when the activity was still called “sidewalk surfing”).If I remember correctly, she only nibbled on
my fingers a few times, but I didn’t mind.People love their bunnies, their dogs and cats, even their regular pigs,
but the guinea pig is all but forgotten these days.Maybe they got a bad reputation for their
ability to be mistaken for rats, as they do in Antonio Boccaci’s Metempsyco
(aka Tomb of Torture).That said, they just don’t bring the chills
like you might think they would.

Anna Darnell (Annie Alberti) is dragged to her
physician father’s village in order to keep her from going insane (this makes
sense to someone somewhere).The
village’s dilapidated castle plays home to cranky dowager Countess Elizabeth (Flora Carosello) and the horridly
disfigured Hugo, who enjoys torturing and murdering nubile young women in the
dungeon/tomb that comes standard in places like this.Anna just so happens to be the spitting image
of Elizabeth’s sister, the missing Countess Irene (also Alberti), which deeply interests (kind of) Raman (Adriano Micantoni), the Countess’
former fiancé.And things go from there.

The title Metempsyco is a shortening of “metempsychosis,” which is a fancy
word for reincarnation, and for once in an Italian genre film of the time, it
actually corresponds to the context of the narrative.There’s the obvious mentioning of the
resemblance between Irene and Anna by every character, but Boccaci also handles the duality of the character in a strong
visual manner.Irene appears as a mute
specter frequently in mirrors that Anna peers into.The countess is a presence looming over Anna,
possessing her body, as well as an ominous harbinger of the physical danger
Anna is in and a representation of the possible madness that imperils her mind.Irene even appears a few times outside of
reflective surfaces, so she becomes more physical than just a rumination on
what’s inside Anna.There’s even a dream
sequence that’s both eerie in its disjointedness and telling as a flashback to
Irene’s fate, and it directly draws a line between the two women, linking them
on a spiritual level as something shared from life to life.

As all cinematic ghosts are,
Irene is the past sin on which the film’s plot turns.We find out rather quickly exactly what
happened to her (it’s pretty inventive), leaving only the mystery of who was
involved in it (which is no real mystery at all) and how the film’s characters must
deal with this.Obviously, Irene can’t
or won’t go away until her life and death have reached full closure.Likewise, the deformed Hugo is the ugly,
corporeal secret of this past that continues to harm the people of the village.The past is, in fact, more important than anything
happening in the present, because it informs every motivation of every
character in the film (one could argue that this applies to all fiction, but I
feel that it’s more pointedly true in Metempsyco
and films like it).Until this is dealt
with, no one can move on.

Similarly, the castle and its
inhabitants, in fact the whole village, simultaneously embody opulence and
rot.We’re shown this from the film’s
start.It opens with an establishing
shot of the castle exterior, looking the worse for wear.We then get a POV shot (heavy breathing
included) of the castle’s interior, the finely woodworked doors, the various
large busts, the bookcases, etcetera.This cuts to a skull hanging in blackness, and the camera tracks in on a
human eyeball in its socket.It then
switches back to the POV shot, and we now get a “rat” (one of the
aforementioned guinea pigs) crawling on the fireplace’s mantle.This bastion of finery is decayed, just as
Irene’s corpse is.It is beauty and ugliness
combined.In this same manner, you have
the beast Hugo who captures, strips, tortures, and kills a couple of snooping
girls (in a Psycho-esque prologue of
some length).In this village, beauty is
threatened and must be destroyed.Elizabeth, not an ugly woman, per se, is given a stern iciness which
drains what comely attributes she may have once had, and her all-black ensemble
only adds to her forbidding mien.She
may be wealthy, but she’s practically dead inside.Anna’s arrival is a threat to the fetidness
of the locale as well as being the reincarnation of Irene’s allure, so she is
in turn threatened.The castle is old
affluence consumed by its greed and turned monstrous.

Lust and madness are also
intertwined in the film.Elizabeth’s
lust turned to envy of Irene, driving her to madness and murder.Anna struggles against some vague genetic
insanity, but she beds down with gormless reporter George (Marco Mariani).This does
nothing to stave off her mental instability and seems to exacerbate it.Raman lusts for Anna the same as he did
Irene, driving him to act the stalker throughout the film.And then there’s Hugo who is clearly
psychopathic and indulges his cravings for female flesh in erotic murderous
fantasies.

There are some surprises to be
had in Metempsyco, primarily stemming
from the lurid quality that informs its plot.Death is brutally delivered by more than one character with shocking
starkness.There’s no actual skin on
display, but both consensual sex and rape are presented as a matter of
course.Oddities are left unexplained or
only partially explained, augmenting the nightmarish ambiance of the film.Yes, the plot is as well-trodden as the
cobbled streets of Pamplona and as enigmatic as a stapler, but it all works
because of its macabre disarray.This is
pure pulp served up with a heightened gloom that makes it all the more
nasty.It’s a shame Boccaci didn’t direct another film (and only wrote a total of
four), because he clearly had the sensibilities to be one of the more inventive
and intriguing filmmakers of Italian genre cinema.Plus, he was unafraid to try passing off
guinea pigs as rats, and you have to admire that kind of moxie.

MVT:The atmosphere of the
film is infused with elderly gothic trappings and modern pulp perversity,
blurring the two together admirably.

Make or Break:The prologue
showcases everything there is to love about the film.

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